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For my multimedia final project I created a website to host the (as of now) nonexistent Globe Choice Awards. The idea was to create a platform where students could nominate and vote for their favorite restaurants and find new ones to try out. This would also be a way to promote the Globe and possibly garner student discounts at the restaurants involved. The site has several polls for voting, restaurant profiles and a gallery, extensive tagging so users can sort by price range and cuisine, a map that can be viewed by price range and cuisine, and social media integration to encourage users to share who they voted for and see who other people voted for on a tagboard. I would have liked to have more reporting on the restaurants, maybe some video or radio. But it was a fun project I’d like to revisit in the future.

Today was our last day in Amsterdam and also our last day! First thing in the morning I headed to the Van Gogh museum. I ended up spending about three hours there. The Van Gogh was really cool because it was like taking a walk through Van Gogh’s life. They talked about his influences and artist friends and had samples of all their work. They also had an enormous collection of his letters.(more…)

Ketchum was an awesome media visit. We did two interesting case studies. The first was hosted by Tim de Boer, the CEO, about Nespresso and their recycling problem. Nespresso (and bottled water) had been banned in government buildings in Germany because of waste. But Nespresso pods are completley recyclable, it’s just no one knows that. So an awareness problem turned into an image problem. A big takeaway was that most crises are self imposed.

More media visits! Today we visited two newspapers, one focused on Amsterdam and one national paper. I thought I would like Het Parool, the Amsterdam paper, but they seemed very liberal for the sake of liberalism and like they were trying really hard to be cool. Its history was interesting, how they started as an anti-German paper during WWII and that’s how they gained their popularity after the war. There was a big focus on how to draw in younger readers, which they do by making some of their articles free online and having an additional online section. Also, they addressed that their newsroom is primarily Dutch and white, but they try to have diversity through their subject matter to appeal to Amsterdam’s diversity. I don’t buy it. I still think that if you want to represent a population in your content, that population has to be represented behind the scenes.

Today was our first Amsterdam media visit! We went to Vrije Universiteit to meet with Dr. Jolien Arendsen. It was very different talking to someone who views media from an academic perspective versus the professional perspective. Based on this talk, the Dutch seem like they’re miles ahead of the United States when it comes to methods of reaching younger audiences. According to Dr. Arendsen, younger audiences pay less attention to hard news and more attention to soft news and non-news. These trends are present in all audiences, but stronger in young ones. They have an ambivalent relationship with the news.

The canal ride in Amsterdam was a little less intimate than the one in Brugge, and told place on a covered boat, but nonetheless it was a cool view of the city. The canal-side houses are gorgeous, and coming from a city impacted shaped by river commerce it was interested to see a city shaped by canals. Amsterdam makes a lot of sense as a port and I think it’s impacted the culture quite a bit, from the multiculturalism to the legalized taboos.

This morning we left Belgium and headed into the Dutch countryside. It was a lot of driving, but it was very cool to see modern windmills alongside the traditional ones. We got into Holland and made a stop at the Keukenhof, the dutch tulip gardens.

Brugge is a city of great food and better beer, and they aren’t shy about either. Today we went to the Chocolate Museum of Brugge, and learned, among other things, why the Belgians have the best chocolate. The museum was set up as a walk through history, starting with the origins of the cocoa bean, moving into the European adoption of it and how the Belgian’s superior standards and ingredients made them the chocolate experts.

Today was our last day in London. Emily and I went up to Camden for some shopping. It was a really cool neighborhood. We got there about an hour before the market opened so we took a walk up Primrose Hill because I had heard that there was an incredible panorama of London at the top. It was a hard climb but the view did not disappoint.

Our first visit was at Battenhall. It’s a very young company and it’s only existed for three years, but they do really incredible work and have a great company culture. It’s a tech focused social media public relations agency. They’re all about word of mouth and don’t advertise for themselves at all. The founder, Drew Benvie, told us their strategy was “do great work, get talked about.”